Blog of author Sarah Deming

June 01, 2017

Malingerings

My summer project is to get out of the city as much as possible, ostensibly to write my boxing novel but so far just to procrastinate, hence this blog post, and malinger, which is my new favorite word.

This week I have imposed myself on my former writing teacher in idyllic Amagansett. Steve Friedman is one of those people without whom I would have given up writing. He hired me to assist on Scott Jurek's memoir Eat and Run, despite the fact that I was due to donate a kidney midway through, and he once told me, a propos of my love for the essay form and lack of computer skills, "You are a young dinosaur," which I still use as an affirmation.

"Me Slag no like anything!"

When I was little, kids used to tease me by calling me "tri-Sarah-tops," which really hurt my feelings but now doesn't seem so bad. Although I lack the distinctive facial horn, I am low-to-the-ground, combative, and nearly extinct.

Here's some other chestnuts from Steve Friedman:

Funny stuff comes in threes.

Things have more power when they remain unnamed.

Write what you write best, rather than reaching for what you admire in others.

I especially needed that last one. We undervalue what comes easily, but the reason it comes easily is because it is ours. For example, I look up to my friend Shahirah, because her writing displays such timeliness and astute political understanding, but I know better than to try to write like that.

Shahirah also keeps me from giving up writing. I have pined for her greatly since her removal to Chi-town, but she is most excellent on the texteses and today inspired me with some words about Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose morning schedule makes me feel marginally better about myself:

CHARTMISS MILLAYDec. 31, 1940

Awoke 7:30, after untroubled night. Pain less than previous day.7:35- Urinated- no difficulty or distress7:40- 3/8 gr. M.S. {morphine shot} hypodermically, self-administered in left upper arm…7:45-8- smoked cigarette (Egyptian) mouth burns from excessive smoking8:15- Thirsty, went to the ice box for a glass of water, but no water there. Take can of beer instead which do not want. Headache, lassitude…8:20- cigarette (Egyptian)9:00- “9:30- Gin Rickey (cigarette)11:15- Gin Rickey12:15- Martini (4 cigarettes)12:45- 1/4 grain M.S. & cigarette1.- Pain bad and also in lumbar region. no relief from M.S.

I think I like the word "malinger" so much because it somehow feels onomatopoetic, although it can't be, since malingering is pretty much a silent activity apart from the sound of your fingers on the keyboard as you Google your frenemies and the occasional sigh of self-pity.

Claudia Rankine (who is sighing for a much more legit reason) writes:

"To live through the days sometimes you moan like a deer. Sometimes you sigh. The world says stop that. Another sigh. Another stop that. Moaning elicits laughter, sighing upsets. Perhaps each sigh is drawn into existence to pull in, pull under, who knows; truth be told, you could no more control these sighs than that which brings the sighs about."

Citizen is a brilliant, beautiful, compressed, genre-defying book that I read on the recommendation of my husband, the misogynist, who sighed a whole lot while he was being trolled.

I'll eventually stop calling my husband "The Misogynist," but not yet, because it's still too much fun. He took a while to stop calling me "The Replicant" after my jump rope injury put me in an orthopedic boot that he claimed made me look like a robot from Blade Runner. This was actually a compliment, though. Because look at Pris.

Coincidentally, I sustained the jump rope injury aboard the same ill-fated jazz cruise on which Ethan became a misogynist by interviewing Robert Glasper. Although maybe it wasn't so ill-fated as we once suspected, because, while I iced my leg and malingered, he spent the cruise composing a suite of music for a new Mark Morris dance called Pepperland that just premiered in Liverpool to great acclaim.

I was lucky enough to catch a dress rehearsal, although without Elizabeth Kurtzman's fabulous costumes. The music is beautiful and strange, for voice, theramin (!!!), piano, harpsichord, trombone, soprano sax (Sam Newsome!), and drums. The dance, like all of Mark's work, is both simple and deep, funny and sad. I can't wait until it comes to BAM.

There are actual roosters crowing as I blog, which reminds me that "cock-a-doodle-do" was the example my sixth grade English teacher, Ferne, gave when I asked her what "onomatopoetic" meant. When I touched down in Paris for the first time, a passenger on my plane cried out "Cocorico!" which is how roosters crow in French.

My Sanskrit teacher, Vyas Houston, said all of Sanskrit was like that, the sound of the words matching the essential vibration of the objects they signified, even for abstract nouns like satya or ahimsa. I don't know how accurate that is, but I do know that Vyas lived in a world of enhanced connection to sound. In a weekend seminar of 40 people, he would have everyone's name memorized by the end of the morning session, and it wasn't some cheap memory trick. He matched the sound of your name to who you were. When you ran into him years later, he still knew your name.

"Writing is writing," says Steve, when I tell him all I did today was blog. "Even not writing is writing."